Statement of Maude Hurd, ACORN National President

May 6th, 2008

ACORN Statement

Women’s Voices, Women Vote, an organization that does first-rate work to register unmarried women and African American  voters,  has recently been wrongly accused of engaging in voter suppression.

The reality is the opposite.   In just the past six months, WVWV has submitted 400,000 voter registration applications.  About 1/3 of these are minority voters.  In North Carolina, from February until the primary registration deadline it helped 26,000 people register to vote.  The majority of these voters are African American.  It is because of WVWV’s work that they are able to vote in the primary.

Women's Voter Registration Group Responds To Critics

May 6th, 2008

Read the original article at Wired.com

By Sarah Lai Stirland May 05, 2008 | 9:29:38 PM

The Washington, DC non-profit group Women's Voices, Women Vote says that more than half of the North Carolinians it helped to register to vote in the presidential primary between February and April this year were African American.

"In February, March and early April of this year, WVWV registered 26,000 voters in North Carolina, approximately 57 percent of whom are African American," the organization noted in a statement issued Monday. "No organization that would spend resources to register these voters would then turn around and attempt to disenfranchise them in May."

The group says that its mailings and automated phone calls, which featured an African-American male, and another female voice, went out to "all unmarried women – white, African American and latina – as well as to African American men and married African American and Latina women."